Webmaster
The whole reason that you're reading this is because of some stuff that started way back in 1996. That was the first time I was ever online, and in less then 10 years I have gone from just some newbie surfing the internet to someone making pages for people to surf. Here's how it happened.
If you've seen the link about all my past computers, then you know I've been a computer nerd since I was about 9. However, it wasn't until 1996 that I actually ventured into the world of cyberspace on my trusty IBM Aptiva. Sometimes it feels like it was ages ago, sometimes it feels like it was yesterday. So I signed up for a lame ass dial up that connected at best 24K. My friend and I had signed up for Internet classes at the local college, which didn't start until the fall. By the time it was Internet class time, I had already learned most of the ins and outs of the Internet. I still went to the class because I had paid for it, and this is where my instructor showed me the glory that was Talkcity. He wanted us to go in there and check it out, as just one of the wonders of the Internet. I went in and although we were supposed to go in as a guest and not register, that night in class I registered Way2Cool as my nickname. A star was born...sort of.
The first thing I did when I got home that night was go to talkcity.com and get back in that chat room. By default I wound up in EZLitely, and met a few people in there who talked me through getting Pirch32 on my computer as a chat client. Once I got Pirch32, I wound up in a room called newbies, which is where I met most of my chatting pals. A lot of history happened in that room, and I would have to say, chatting wise, it was a great time. Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end.
If you check out my internet dating page you will see a large part of the reason behind the downfall of my chatting time. However on the plus side, one of the perks you got when you were a registered member of Talkcity was a free homepage (think Geocities). They had one or two templates that you could go in, enter some basic information and end up with a cookie cutter webpage. That was really cool for a while. There was a directory to check out pages of other Talkcity members and I would always browse through other peoples pages and see cool things I would want to try out for myself. I didn't know HTML very well back in those days. I ended up using Netscape Composer to create my first very basic non template site. The whole experience was new to me, but I thought it was pretty cool.
I didn’t have much of anything on the site except a few jokes that I got in my emails and shout outs to my chatting friends. In the long run though, I always kind of thought that was just a little cheap and easy; like your sister. I don't know if blogs were out there, but if they were, they weren't popular like now. I more or less redesigned the site once every couple weeks, adding a new graphic or whatever here and there. I went through all the phases that most people that make sites go through. I added the animated gifs, I added midi sounds on some pages and I some wav sounds as well. Although when you are first starting out with a website you think that stuff is cool, it gets bothersome after a while and I abandoned it all for content. I think if you are going to do something cool on your site with animation, then learn Flash; otherwise leave the sounds and moving images on your hard drive. I didn't know what to put down, so I started writing about things that pissed me off and whatnot, beginning with my MTV rant. From there my content grew.
The more I worked on the website, the less I chatted. Chatting had become an addiction in the past, where the web design was something I liked but wasn't totally obsessed with. As I've mentioned on other parts of the site, I was staying up until 3am some nights chatting on here, and it was having a negative effect on my personal life as well as my job; so I gave it up for a little while. This was during the whole Pookie experience I was having, and I just up and left Talkcity for a while. Eventually, I did wander back in. After about a six month hiatus, I decided to go back for a while. The first thing I learned is that most of my old friends were no longer chatting, at least not in Newbies as I had left them. It was almost like going back into your old high school and realizing that all your old friends aren't there anymore. I decided that I would go search for a new place to go, and after playing around for a while, I landed in a room called Peachez. In that room, I met PeachezNCream, who is now known as Lisa, or clbjgrl... and bj stands for Blue Jackets just to clarify. Lisa and I both had the same shitty job; working HBC in a grocery store. We got to know each other after a while of trading war stories from the field and I now had a reason to go back into Talkcity. Lisa was also a major contributor in helping me write my first Customer Sucks page. After a while, we just ended up using MSN Messenger and AOL Messenger to communicate and got out of Talkcity completely.
I ventured into Talkcity a couple more times after that, but never really found anymore friends or rooms that I enjoyed. I kept on working on my web pages and had opted to use my Yahoo account to get my free Geocities page and I ended up doing a lot of my page stuff there. I was back online a little more and my site was gaining a few more articles here and there.
Talkcity on the other hand crashed and burned in the late 90's. Luckily I had everything backed up on my hard drive and had already moved my content to my free Geocities account. The unfortunate thing about Geocities was that I never liked that stupid ad in the upper right corner. Eventually I signed up with a free web page service called FCpages. It was cool because my web address was http://way2cool.fcpages.com, so I had my name in my web site address.
After I had switched I kept looking for a different program to use for making web pages. I ended up buying ULEAD Photo Impact, which was a photo editor with web page making capabilities. I played with that program so much doing different things and trying to make unique looking sites. For quite some time that became my program for making all of my web pages.
In August of 2002 after getting back from a vacation in Rapid City, South Dakota I decided I wanted to write about my experience there and thought; why not start doing a blog? At the time I didn't have any blog software so I did it all in HTML.
Sometime around the end of 2002 I had decided that I was sick of being known as "Way2Cool". I had been going by that name for almost 7 years at the time both in chat and on my website. It was quite a major step to take, completely dropping your identity and picking up a new one. However, as I looked at all of the content that was on my website I noticed that I bitched a lot, in fact I was rather disgruntled. I thought about it for a while and I decided that I would change my name to disgruntled human. I ended up changing my Yahoo sign in to that, and I also changed all of the graphics on my site to reflect that as well. After a while I thought that calling myself disgruntled human on a site that had way2cool in the address was contradictory. That's when I signed up for a new site in the fcpages directory under disgruntledhuman.fcpages.com.
It was also during this time that I made my very first 3rd Bass page. I ended up signing up for the domain 3rdbass.fcpages and added that to my list of websites. The first page was very generic and only had a few pictures I had found on the web and just track listings of the songs on the albums. It was bare bones at best, although I was getting hits on it and emails telling me how cool it was to see someone out there respecting 3rd Bass.
Shortly thereafter the age of the popup was starting to bloom. In the past all of the ads on my site were either at the top or the bottom of every page on my site. Unfortunately when the pop up technology came to a head, that's what started showing up on my site. I loved making my site, but I hated sending it to anyone because of all the stupid pop ups. In April of 2003 I had finally had it with all of the popups that were on my site so I decided it was time to purchase my own domain and a web hosting package. Since I had already abandoned the Way2Cool name and took on Disgruntled Human I looked for disgruntledhuman.com. Imagine my surprise when I found it available.
I ended up buying my domain and web hosting through Geocities. I had never done this before so I had no idea what to expect or look for in a package. Geocities were OK to start out with, however they offered me absolutely no perks for the price I was paying. In January of 2004 I decided that I was sick of doing my blog in HTML and I wanted a real blog like I saw elsewhere all over the internet. Geocities didn't have any databases for their users to use blog software with, so I ended up going with a free service offered by Bravenet. Well, free service equals ads and popups.
By the time my year of service In mid March of 2004 I was extremely frustrated with the popups that came with the blog and the lack of extras with my website. At the suggestion of Nola from over at onlynola.com and lookingglasslounge.org I decided to switch over to 100megs as my new web host. Through Geocities I was paying $8.95 a month for my web hosting. For that money they were giving me 25MB of web storage space, 5 sub domains and 5 email accounts. When I switched over to 100megs I got 400MB of web storage, 15 sub domains and 15 email accounts, and it was $49.99 for the entire year. That was less than half price for a whole lot more. For that price and what I’m getting for that buck, the move was the best thing I could have done for this site.
Shortly after moving to 100megs I got brave and decided I would install a real blog on my site. First I looked at GreyMatter for my needs. I actually installed GreyMatter and had a test blog entry running and then for some reason I removed it and put Movable Type in instead. If I'm not mistaken it was because Movable Type allowed me to take all of my old blog entries and pre date them and stick them in, so everything was all in one place. I couldn't do that with GreyMatter. Had I been using a real blog from the beginning I could have imported the data into Greymatter but since it was all just HTML I had to do each entry individually... so I did Movable Type.
I also made my 3rd Bass site on a sub domain and I began the process of revamping, which is a process I don't think I'll ever stop. After a while and once again with the help of Nola, I installed PHPBB on my site for a message board for the 3rd Bass site. Like the blog, I had been using a free Bravenet service for my message board and liked the idea of running the whole thing completely off my site with no ads.
That pretty much brings us to where we are today and is the extremely long and most likely boring story of why this page exists today.